Michael Eracleous
Pennsylvania State University, PA·Astronomy & Astrophysics
Nearly every large galaxy has a supermassive black hole at its center, millions to billions of times the Sun's mass. When gas falls onto one, it can shine as a quasar, brighter than all the galaxy's stars, and quasars seem to help shape how galaxies grow.
- Fields
Astronomy & Astrophysics
Physics
- Topics
quasars
active galactic nuclei
supermassive black holes
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Aug 2027
What they work on
- Measure how the broad H-beta emission line, light from fast-moving gas near a supermassive black hole, varies over 1–18 years in about 5,000 Sloan Digital Sky Survey quasars with repeat spectra.
- Build a statistical model of normal quasar spectral variability and use it to compare supermassive black hole binary candidates with a control sample, test the closest candidates and constrain their masses.
- Determine whether changing-look quasars, which brighten or fade faster than theory predicts, are extreme cases of normal variability or a distinct phenomenon, and define the class quantitatively.
More about the research
Quasars are so far away that we cannot see the region around the black hole directly. But their light changes over time, so watching them like a movie rather than a single photo can reveal how gas moves near the black hole.
Why it matters
This is basic science. A statistical model of normal quasar variability could give astronomers a standard way to judge claimed black hole pairs and changing-look quasars. It could clarify how gas behaves around supermassive black holes and inform future monitoring campaigns and studies of how galaxies and their central black holes evolve.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Erin Hicks
University of Alaska Anchorage, AK·Astronomy & Astrophysics
Measure the distribution and motions of molecular, ionized, and coronal gas within the central 500 parsecs of 90 nearby active galactic nuclei, using adaptive-optics near-infrared integral-field spectroscopy from Keck/OSIRIS and VLT/SINFONI.
Adi Foord
University of Maryland-Baltimore County, MD·Astronomy & Astrophysics
Determine how often supermassive black holes merge by using AI to identify galaxy mergers and dual active galactic nuclei (pairs of feeding black holes) in large imaging surveys, and relate these rates to gravitational wave observations.
Philip Hopkins
California Institute of Technology, CA·Astronomy & Astrophysics
Develop new theoretical models of gas inflow onto supermassive black holes, in which strong magnetic fields dominate the accretion disk and change its behavior.
The school
Pennsylvania State University: 60 labs on PI Pages, $1.3B a year on research, 743 research doctorates a year.
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